No abstract

The charge release speed and backward phase switching time of lanthanum-doped lead zirconate titanate stannate antiferroelectric thin films were investigated by directly measuring the switching current upon removal of the applied electric field. The backward switching time is about 6 ns. The maximum switching current density can reach 9400 A/cm2, and more than half of the stored charge can be released in 10 ns. These results show that the obtained antiferroelectric thin films are very promising for decoupling capacitor applications in high speed multichip modules.

High temperature sensors are of major importance to aerospace and energy related industries. In this letter, a high temperature monolithic compression-mode piezoelectric accelerometer was fabricated using YCa4O(BO3)3 (YCOB) single crystals. The performance of the sensor was tested as function of temperature up to 1000 °C and over a frequency range of 100–600 Hz. The accelerometer prototype was found to possess sensitivity of 2.4±0.4 pC/g, across the measured temperature and frequency range, indicating a low temperature coefficient. Furthermore, the sensor exhibited good stability over an extended dwell time at 900 °C, demonstrating that YCOB piezoelectric accelerometers are promising candidates for high temperature sensing applications.

In this paper, we report the development of a simple but precise piezoelectric spectrometer using a Michelson–Morley interferometer. The measurement system has been developed to study the frequency and temperature dependence of the complex piezoelectric and electrostriction coefficients of ferroelectric materials. The spectral data are collected by computer and has significantly wider frequency range and lower noise than other such systems. Results are reported for a quartz sample, a La-modified lead zirconate titanate ferroelectric, and a lead zirconate titanate sol-gel derived ferroelectric thin film.

A bimorph based dilatometer has been developed which enables one to characterize the electric field induced strain response in the out-of-plane direction in thin and soft free standing polymer film samples conveniently over a relatively wide frequency range (1 Hz to 1 kHz). The test results demonstrate that the newly developed dilatometer is capable of detecting displacement down to sub-angstrom range. The agreement between the test results from the bimorph dilatometer, the results from a laser dilatometer, and the model analysis indicates that the device can indeed be used reliably for these measurement with high sensitivity.